Well, as the theologian/BF, I need to chime in for a bit here about Brooks’ proposed use of scriptural texts and/or commentaries. I think the “secular”/”religious” divide that he sets up is a little too pat, as has been pointed out. As a basically conservative person, I do agree with Brooks that there is some sort of encoded wisdom in our political and religious traditions, won by generations of trial and error and most often encoded at the common sense level rather than at the theoretical level. But I think that one can hold up the value of this sort of knowledge without bashing other ways of knowing at the same time (e.g., the “deeper” and “more accurate” comment), and this is important not simply to avoid offending our political scientist significant others, but to defned the validity of what religious language is trying to say. It smacks a little too much of the same “I’m not religious but I am very spiritual” sentiment that sees religious traditions primarily as paths to personal fulfillment and happiness whose statements primarily refer to one’s own feelings and interior psychological state, rather than traditions whose statements are best understood as attempts to make sense of reality by saying something “true” (notice the scare quotes) about the human person, human history and the divine.

Nate writes:
“But in reading each set of texts (and I have), there’s a difference in focus, in intent (which I can’t quite name right now). So I’d be leary of reading Biblical texts as mandating a particualr concept of government.”

Well, yes and no. I think you are right to be leary of regarding the Christian scriptures (while not my area of knowledge, there is a wider spectrum on this question regarding Torah within Judaism and, even more strongly, the Qu’ran) as prescribing a certain sort of political system (”It says here that the Electoral College is an abomination in the eyes of the law”). At the same time, it is a very political text, to use today’s categories. The work of liberation theology and german political theology beginning postwar in the last century is grounded in the attempt to re-discover the fact that when Jesus talked about “forgiveness of sins”, he didn’t solely or even primarily mean that I would be pardoned for thinking bad thoughts about my friend yesterday, but that the People of God was about to be, quite concretely and politically, raised up above its Roman oppressors. Making Christianity, and, mutatis magnis mutandis, Judaism or Islam, another path to personal growth and Jesus an early 20th century existentialist, evacuates the tradition of its ability to speak about reality. This is why Brooks’ “deeper” comment bothers me; not because I want to take a position in a football game between political science and religious wisdom (Go Team!), but because it seems to start down the road of exalting religious wisdom precisely in its “fuzzyness”, which is a short step towards me and my Jesus whose only job is to help me get to sleep at night.

Which brings me to my last, obviously rambling point: by sharply dividing the “religious” from the “political” conceptually, even in his attempt to bring religious traditions to bear on contemporary politics, Brooks appears to undermine the role the “religious” can play in our political life. In his schema, we can read religious texts while bracketing out the “religious” in order to learn about the “human” or the “political”, in the same way that we can read a Shakespeare play either to hear Shakespeare’s view of the person, or to analyze the text for details about life in Elizabethan England. But this already assumes that the “religious” and the “political” are two different things, that going into the hunt looking for political wisdom is to use the text in a way different than that intended (like using “Otello” for data on race relations), and if you’ve done that, you’ve already given away the game, and are now free to bracket off the specifically religious parts of these texts as relating primarily to me and Buddy Jesus, rather than being the foundation for the particular political proposals that arise from a christian view of the human person. If I were to go on, I might ask whether the seemingly “secular” texts of classical Greek political thought are as secular as appears obvious at first glance, but as I fear the DayQuil is speaking more and more, I’m going to stop there.